Monday, December 06, 2004

Metadata as Self Defense

Bootstrapping the semantic Web "It's tempting to draw parallels between the careers of Albert Einstein and Tim Berners-Lee. Both men made world-transforming breakthroughs and then pursued even grander visions. Einstein, of course, never found the unified theory he sought for three decades. A lot of people think Berners-Lee's vision of a semantic Web will prove equally elusive."

"Semantic-Web naysayers think people and organizations can't be bothered to assert machine-readable facts about themselves. And, today, that is undoubtedly true. But when others assert facts about you -- as they increasingly will -- the tide could begin to turn. Individual acts of self-defense may ultimately combine to bootstrap the semantic Web."